Australia clamps down on internet safety

Australian government develops package of measures to improve internet safety and improve security.

SafeMedia is praising an Australian government move toward installing ISP-level internet filtering technology as part of the federal Government's NetAlert package.

Australian Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan recently announced a $189 million package of measures to improve the safety of using the internet, and for a federal police crackdown on predators and national security threats. The package included $84.8 million to provide individual households with either internet filtering software packages or pre-filtered internet connections from an internet service provider.

"We applaud the Australian federal Police, who plan to track down online predators and national security threats, and to provide households with either Internet filtering software packages or pre-filtered Internet connections from an Internet service provider," said President/COO Pasquale Giordano, SafeMedia. "We have the technology that addresses the government's plan to provide individual households or ISPs with a cost effective, zero maintenance solution that eliminates the complex threats of contaminated (illegal) P2P networks, the major source of Internet piracy, viruses, malware, spyware and identity theft.

The Australian government's NetAlert agency research revealed that it had showed server-level filtering introduced a major load on service provider systems. 'All server-level filters tested had a major impact on network performance, ranging from 18 per cent degradation for the best performing filter to 78 per cent for the worst performing,' Senator Coonan's office reported.

SafeMedia's technology is embedded in DSL and Cable modems in the home or work environment or as a subnet appliance, not on the ISP's backbone. This architecture eliminates any network latency and eliminates bandwidth consumption at a subnet level associated with contaminated P2P networks. The end result is a safer, faster Internet experience for all users and a network that consumes less bandwidth, explained Giordano.

The P2P Disaggregator technology drops all contaminated P2P traffic, encrypted and non-encrypted, before they reach the user while allowing legitimate P2P and all other Internet traffic to pass freely with no latency.
In addition, SafeMedia's solution does not require users to install anything on their computers to be protected.

The Australian Government has always taken a very hard stance on copyright infringement and Internet safety. The Copyright Act 1968 ('the Act) imposes strict liability; there is no requirement to show that an infringement occurred "knowingly" or "willfully."

A university can be found liable for authorizing the infringing conduct of staff and/or students where the university has provided access to the equipment used to carry out the infringing conduct (eg personal computers, university servers providing internet access) and not taken reasonable steps to ensure that this equipment is not used to infringe copyright.

In the United States a similar copyright act was passed in 1976. This law was the basis for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) passed in 1998. The DMCA is the law the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) uses it to sue individuals who use contaminated P2P networks to download copyrighted material. The RIAA is back with a bang in kicking off the new school year with pre-litigation notices to 503 piracy suspects at a nearly five dozen different colleges. The letters come in addition to a stack of notices to various institutions every month. In the past, letters were only mailed to the top "worst 20 colleges" at a time. With this month's letters, the RIAA is broadening its crackdown on college song-swapping suspects.

The costs of these stepped up initiatives by the RIAA will force colleges to look at technology solutions that will eliminate all illegal downloading from contaminated P2P networks. "If each campus installed our technology at each department, including the libraries and wireless networks, they would never have to worry about the RIAA. Our P2PD technology embedded in Clouseauâ„¢ is the only cost effective scaleable solution that prevents illegal downloading from encrypted and non encrypted P2P networks; Clouseau never invades user privacy and allows legal bit torrent files and all other Internet traffic to pass unencumbered at network speeds.
Florida Atlantic University has successfully tested SafeMedia's solution and new implementations are projected in several other universities."

Several universities have stepped up their voluntary anti-piracy campaigns on campus, but officials at those institutions don't appear optimistic that their next wave of anti-piracy programs will actually work. From the Boston Globe: 'I thought we were pretty strenuous before, but it hasn't worked,' John Dubach, chief information officer at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which was in the top 20 list of colleges that had received the most copyright complaints from the RIAA.

SafeMedia solutions are the only solution that can insure complete elimination of all the complex threats of contaminated P2P networks and SafeMedia guarantees the solution will eliminate unauthorized copyright infringement from P2P networks.